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Saturday, January 31, 2009

Today Bondagerotica is updated with a review of Circle of Iron a ridiculously pretentious Zen martial arts movie. It features a hippie-dippie traveling Renfair, a man in a barrel of oil (voluntarily, and with no fire underneath it) and an argument over who’s the bigger crucifier of women. Not to mention Kane from Kung Fu spouting Zen babble like he was a bubble machine and they were Zen bubbles. Joe Bob would say “Check it out.”

Well, I finally got around to watching Next because Mrs. Powers told me the movie had a pretty good plot premise -- the hero, played by Nicholas Cage, can see the future, but only two minutes into the future, and by altering his behavior, can change the future. His time limitation keeps him from making long-distance plans, like being god-king of Earth, but it does allow him to change things for his betterment in the short term.

When we initially meet Frank Cadillac (his stage name) he’s making an OK living doing a magic act in a Vegas lounge that involves him pretending that he is reading people’s minds, but instead is only looking two minutes into the future to see what they will say and do, then claims to have “read their minds” when he is actually just predicting the future.

There’s only been one exception to the two-minute rule, a visualization Cadillac has had of (cue Disneyesque bluebirds and squirrels) a Girl (played by Jessica Biel) who might be The One for him.

Cadillac also uses his gift to make money at the local casinos, winning small stakes poker hands and such, never taking in any big pots and occasionally losing so the casino overseers won’t know he’s “cheating” (I.e., beating the house consistently) and invite him out of their casino.

This practice comes a-cropper when Cadillac’s gift tells him that a man standing near him in the casino will attempt to rob the casino and will kill some people in the process. Cadillac sees that he can prevent this by attacking the man before he can draw his gun.

He wrenches the gun out of the man’s hands, but the casino cops think he’s the robber. So Cadillac uses his ability to predict the future to make an escape. It’s ridiculously easy for him because he can see ahead to know which routes and which moves will get him captured, and which won’t.

An FBI agent (Julianne Moore, doing a great job with the role) sees the casino’s tape of the robbery attempt and realizes that Cadillac has the power of precognition. She’s on the trail of terrorists who have a nuclear bomb and seem likely to blow it up somewhere in Vegas. She locates Cadillac and tries to enlist him in the chase, but he’s not interested because people used to make him look at flash cards and predict their outcome when he was a kid, plus he’s all hot to find The Girl.

OK, that’s an idiot plot right there. Cadillac doesn’t seem to “get” that the explosion of a nuclear device nearby will have a huge negative effect on his health and the health of The Girl. Being able to look two minutes into the future wouldn’t do anyone a hell of a lot of good if they’re that fucking stupid, so that shot the movie’s credibility all to hell for me right there.

Worse still (I could overlook the idiot plot if the movie were otherwise entertaining) is the fact that the movie drags like hell whenever The Girl storyline occurs, and there is a heck of a lot of The Girl storyline because she becomes a damsel in distress.

As much as I loves me some damsel in distress action, I think Next would have been a much better, more interesting movie if the storyline involving The Girl had been dumped entirely and it had been a straight-up story about the hunt for the terrorists and their nuke.

Of course, one interpretation of The Girl storyline would be that it was there to stretch the story out -- that with Cadillac’s powers it would be all too easy to locate and neutralize the terrorists -- all he would have to do is tell the FBI agents which moves would work best from minute to minute.

Well, let’s just say that this would not be a problem if the movie didn’t cheat on the basic premise concerning Cadillac’s power. I can’t be more specific without giving away too much of the plot.

I never thought I would want to toss a perfectly good damsel in distress scene out of a movie, but if it meant getting rid of The Girl plotline, I’d do it in a heartbeat. That’s a measure of how badly this movie misses the mark. What a shame: the central concept of the movie was brilliant and could have made a great thriller.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Foot in mouth disease strikes a bondage model every 28 minutes here in the United States, even in this day of advanced medicine, and she's pretty darned sick of it. This tragic debilitating condition has no known cure, except of course for taking one's foot out of one's mouth. If you'd like to help, please send money to me, Pat Powers. It won't help foot in mouth victims, but it will help me, Pat Powers.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Here's an image from a Busby Berkeley musical ("Fashions of 1934") where women do the House of Gord's human furniture thing in the guise of being part of a spectacular musical number. Not only are they in furniture bondage, but they're just barely dressed by the standards of the day, and skimpily attired for any times. Reportedly, one stage mother is said to have complained, "Mr. Berkeley, I have not raised my daughter to be a human harp!"

Ah, the good old days, when you could get away with this kind of stuff because no one knew what the hell you were up to ...

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Sexy Xenia Seeburg (think “Lexx“) inadvertently gives her partner a bondage lap dance in the obscure comedy, “Knocking On Heaven’s Door.” Would you have even heard of this movie if it weren‘t for this clip? I wonder how many copies of the movie this clip has sold (if any are available).

An interesting debate has broken out over Brians’ and Pofoz’s discussion page. There are a variety of sites -- Raffishs’s Didclip site (see link list) is one -- where video clips of bondage scenes from movies and TV shows are available. Some, like Raffish, charge a premium for membership. And apparently, some clip website owners are now putting logos on the clips they produce to identify the clips as having been produced by them.

The reason some identify this as piracy is because the clips are all from mainstream TV shows and movies that the website owners did not produce and hence, do not own.

Let me use an analogy to explain my feelings on the matter. Say a farmer owns a big apple orchard, part of which fronts a road used by kids who walk to school along it. Portions of the trees in the orchard hang over the fence that fronts the road, and every year they drop a lot of apples to the ground which mostly just lie there and rot, or get eaten by small animals. The ground is still on the farmer’s property, it just isn’t worth the time and trouble to him to harvest them -- they’re a tiny smidgen of what is in the orchard proper.

The kids who walk to and from school eat the apples, too. Are they stealing? The law is clear: they are stealing, because the apples belong to the farmer. But ethically are they stealing? Of course not: the apples would just rot on the ground if they didn’t eat them. You might make an argument that they are being socially responsible by not letting a food resource go to waste.

Now, take it one step further. Suppose one enterprising kid collects some of the apples in a box as he walks down the road and sells them at a roadside stall. Is he stealing? Yes. Is he being unethical? No. The apples would still go to waste, and he’s hardly doing the farmer any economic harm since his sales are literally nothing compared to the farmer’s sales. In collecting the apples and presenting them conveniently to roadside travelers he is doing them a service, and deserves to be recompensed for his efforts.

I think this is a very apt comparison because the rights to most films and TV shows are owned by large media conglomerates. None of them, to my knowledge, has ever collected a set of bondage clips and marketed it to anyone. I don’t see it happening in the foreseeable future, either -- too many groups would protest the living hell out of it if a mainstream publisher did such a thing. Bondage clips of mainstream movies and TV shows are EXACTLY like the apples on the other side of the fence -- they’re legally the possession of the companies that own them, but the companies have no interest in using them. Therefore, the guys who are collecting them and selling them are not harming the companies in any way. They are doing mainstream bondage fans a service, and deserve to be compensated for their work, even if they don’t own legal copyright to the works.

I think this is why the mainstream companies don’t prosecute the websites that sell/distribute vidclips of bondage scenes. There’s no harm being done to the companies, and perhaps even some good. The clips being distributed almost certainly create interest in and sales of the movies they’re from. All to the good, from the companies’ point of view.

Now, bondage clips from COMMERCIAL bondage videos that are collected and resold would definitely be a different matter. Making vidclips of these and selling them or even just distributing them for free would be not only against the law but unethical -- you would be directly competing with them and harming their business.

However, I have to point out that many commercial bondage filmmakers freely distribute brief clips of their films, as promotional items. This in no way lessens the illegality or unethicalness of making clips and distributing them without the commercial websites’ permission, but it DOES point out the usefulness of widely distributed free clips from a film, from the filmmakers’ perspective.

I frankly think the copyright laws need to be changed -- they have shifted far too much in the direction of the corporations that own copyrights. The present loophole that allows companies to evade the public domain aspects of copyright by trade marking characters in the stories, etc., would be an excellent place to start. Getting the public domain release of copyrighted materials back to reasonable levels would also be a good idea -- just because somebody writes a good book, we don’t owe their descendants a free ride unto the nth generation (Edgar Rice Burroughs descendants, I‘m looking at you!). And some sort of “use it or lose it’ provision would prevent the kind of stupid cock-ups that keeps anyone from making an movies based on “Let’s Go Play at the Adams.”

Friday, January 23, 2009

“So, I'm still not clear on this. Am I being tortured on a rack or a spinning wheel?”

Bondagerotica is updated with a review of Thor and the Amazon Women, the film that features the Triangle of Death, the Irregular Polygons of Doom, the Spiky Gantry, the Spinny Pokey Thing, the Exotic Rack, mass yoke bondage, weird tribal masks, Smurf heads with whips, a hero named Tarzan, Taur and Thor all at the same time, and well, a hell of a lot of other things. It's so weird and funny that it practically MST3K's itself.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Remember when I said there was no leather gag ever seen on a mainstream TV game show? I was damn lucky I specified "game show" because this is a vidcap from an episode of CSI. Also, there's no evidence of a plug in this gag -- the stitching in the middle just holds the two sides together. There are no telltale rivets or whatever to hold the plug in place. In this case, to borrow a term from religious debates, the absence of evidence IS evidence of absence. The nosehole ... now that's just chickening out.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

“Please stop drooling.”

This is Misty Mundae from a promotional shoot for her movie "Roxanna." I know there's no bondage involved, and I don't normally just post a picture because it's hot, but DAMN that is one fine-looking photo of her. I'm sure it's been touched up, because I've seen a couple of movies and she didn't look like that. I think it's the shading on the skin. But those hips, those legs ... they're all her, all right.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Getting organized has its rewards, sometimes unexpected. I’m engaged in the tedious process of converting all my videotapes, some of which date back to the early Triassic, into DVDs as it’s gotten damn hard to buy VHS tape players lately. When I copy a tape, I do a quick spin through the DVD to make sure the content of the tape is the same as indicated on the label.

While spinning through a DVD copy of a tape called “Pinups 2” I noticed a familiar-looking face. Was it … could it be … sure looked an awful lot like Dita von Teese. So I checked the credits, and sure enough, “Introducing Dita” showed up.

I had a very early Dita von Teese fetish modeling tape and didn’t even know it. Virtue triumphs again.

Friday, January 16, 2009

"But officer, what did we do?""You wore a thong, ma'am.""But this is the beach, there's no law against wearing a thong at the beach.""Never said there was, ma'am. We just like putting handcuffs on cute women in thongs."

Image source: something I found somewhere at some time or other on the Web.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

The gag seen above is, if I recall correctly, from a Brazilian game show. I don’t know the name of the show, in fact, I’m not absolutely sure it’s a Brazilian show, but there’s one thing I damn sure do know: it’s not a U.S. game show.

I know this, not just because it’s a huge honkin’ over the mouth leather gag, but because of those three rivets running right up the middle of the gag, right where the wearer’s mouth is. There’s only one possible function those three rivets could possibly have -- to hold a plug of some kind that goes into the wearer’s mouth, further preventing the wearer from speaking clearly.

I don’t even think there has ever been a US game show in which gags were used, period, much less a fricking leather plug gag. I don’t believe there have even been leather plug gags worn on US TV in any way shape or form. Brazil (or perhaps another country) is forging ahead of us in this important cultural milestone, while our leaders stand idly by and watch us fail. For shame, American TV producers, for shame!

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Bondagerotica is updated with a review of the movie Quake. Sure, a story about an obsessive love, kidnapping, class differences and so forth has some interest, but what really adds excitement to it is an earthquake. Well, it adds something to the movie.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

One of the directors on Raffish's recent selection of DiD scenes with commentaries from actors and directors involved in the scenes said that he thought that the interest in bondage arises from an infantile need to assure an adequate supply of breast milk.

I don't agree with that analysis, it's just way too pat for me. My theory is "I don't know." I've yet to hear a convincing explanation for the bondage fetish, and I've read a lot of them. But I do know that this is an excellent opportunity to show the pic above of Darling's very fine natural left breast in bondage.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

One of the images from my vidcaps of Slavegirls From Beyond Infinity just screamed to be made into a wallpaper. So I followed through with it. Just click on the oversized thumbnail pic to see the wallpaper, then do a "Save Image As" and go through whatever arcane process your operating system requires to make it your desktop background image -- my system requires fresh goat's blood and dancing widdershins in the moonlight. Well, that's Vista for you!